As a happy Christmas gesture, here’s some Google news along with rants from other corners of the online and offline world, for one and all.

What’s going on in the Google world? First, beware: If you’re bidding on certain niche keywords that have low search volume, then Google may just as well decide not to show you at all. Even if you’ve got a fantastic quality score.

So what can you do? (1) Curse. (2) Bid on less relevant keywords. (3) Hope and pray that your super-niche keyword suddenly becomes more popular and Google decides to start showing it again. (4) Send Google fan mail, telling them just how happy you really are.

In other web news: Some wild-eyed German guys (kids?) have already skipped over Web 2.0 and are designing Web 3.0. Yup. They call it the “semantic web,” an odd term to convey the idea that stuff on the web will be described with special descriptor languages so that computers can “understand” what exactly they are. Uses cyber-objects called “spotlets” that you can move and sort and activate and manipulate. Kind of cool. Kind of Apple-ish even.

Meanwhile, we’re getting used to Web 2.0. As Perry Belcher describes it, it’s like being at one big giant party, all the time.

“Montana Sucks … Now Go Home and Tell Your Friends”

I stumbled across this today. It is my new favorite website for about the next half-hour. It put me in a funny mood. Visit the site and buy one of the t-shirts.

Somewhere in all of this is a model for using humor and a little old-fashioned reverse psychology to get people to visit your site and stay there and buy things from you.

If you’re funny enough on your landing page, people will keep looking for more funnyness. And your quality score will go up, the funnier you are.

Funny, of course, is an art. Just don’t imitate other people’s “funny” and you’ve got a good shot.

Those Lovely Gift Boxes Have Disappeared!

It was going to be a great Christmas idea, but now they’re not selling them on the website anymore. I’m talking about TheOnion.com (pretty much the cleverest pedestrian-level American political/social comedy-satire site on the web) and their faux gift boxes.

I was wanting to buy a whole package of these, because it would include boxes for the USB Toaster (“Up to four pieces of toast in 30 minutes!”), the Salt of the Month Club (“A pound of salt, delivered fresh to your doorstep every month!”), the Make-Your-Own-Umbrella Kit, and the Peaceful Progression Smoke Alarm (“Wake up to your next fire alarm calm and refreshed!”). Maybe they’re out of stock. And that’s too bad, because it would be a great way to spice up otherwise plain Christmas gifts.

Especially if your family happens to be doing an All-Gift-Card Christmas this year. (“Ooh, another $15 card from WalMart! Bless your heart.”)

Two Films to Blow Your Eyes Out of Their Sockets

Veteran director Werner Herzog said that if we do not find new images, we will perish.

I’m going to be serious and talk about movies. I see a damn good lot of them, at least three a week, minimum. I check Metacritic.com religiously so as to separate the wheat from the chaff, and have it down to a fine science. As a result I never, EVER see bad movies anymore. Only good ones. And damn good ones.

Among the better new films I saw in 2008:

• Man On Wire. In 1974 Philippe and his pals strung a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and then he walked across. All this happened without the police security guards knowing about it … until he was already done. (True story.)
• Encounters at the End of the World. When you shake the planet, all of its oddest, quirkiest, cleverest and most unusual characters somehow end up falling to the bottom. Namely, Antarctica. This is not a film about fuzzy penguins. It is about those such people.
• Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Woody Allen is still alive and kicking.
• Rachel Getting Married. This is the coolest, most eclectic wedding you will ever see. It will also tear up your insides.
• Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Don’t ever try to rob your mom’s jewelry store.

Plus, from the archives:

• Grave of the Fireflies, the 1988 Anime, from Japan. It broke my heart.
• Rear Window, Hitchcock’s delightful, simple and engaging 1954 suspense classic. Did you know that Jimmy Stewart wore a toupee?

Now, to the new images.

I saw yet another amazing film the other day: “The Fall,” a deeply flawed and imperfect but still unbelievable visual spectacle, from director Tarsem Singh. His work is a tip of the hat to several prior directors and prior films, not the least of which is “Baraka,” an obscure but incredible visual journey made in 1992 and recently re-released on Blu-Ray.

“Baraka” is, by the way, the most mind-boggling Blu-Ray you will ever see. Its production spanned 24 countries. It was photographed in its entirety in Todd-AO, a 65mm format. The only film to use such technology in 38 years.

Its level of detail is lifelike to the point of incredible. If you are a collector of arthouse films, and if you own a Blu-Ray player, then you must own “Baraka.”

The film, I warn you, is not for children. It is a tour of the world and as such takes in a myriad of deeply, deeply disturbing images. As well as beautiful images. Some of the most breathtaking images you will ever see. Sequenced in a fashion that tells a harrowing story, and which leaves you with the profound sense that planet earth is the most unique, precious and fragile among celestial ornaments, hung delicately, tentatively, in space.

So then there’s “The Fall,” the one I saw last Saturday, a far less perfect film. One which draws a handful of its key images from “Baraka,” but which is every bit as visually daring. Released on a limited scale in 2008, it took four years to make and was actually completed in 2006.

No YouTube video clip can do a film like this justice. No matter. Here is the trailer.

And here is the link to the Apple Trailers page, which gives you much clearer options.

Do you hear that music in the latter part of the trailer, by the way? It’s taken from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. Why create a new score from scratch when one of western Europe’s great composers already created a perfect one for you?

I recommend that you see these films. Not together, not in sequence. No, you just put them on your list and watch them whenever you can get your hands on them, but separately. Odds are your local Blockbuster won’t have both of them. They are strange films. Disturbing films. Imperfect films. (The acting and dialogue in the fantasy scenes of “The Fall” are awkward and unsuccessful. The storyline develops at a snail’s pace and repeatedly leaves too much open and unclear.) But that doesn’t matter. The arresting visuals more than make up for it. Both were done, claim the directors, without the aid of computer graphics. You watch them because they expand the mind. You watch them because they give you a new mental mechanism by which to imagine the world around you. You watch them because both are a festival of color and light and shadow and motion. You watch them because they blow your mental horizons wide open. You watch each one, as Roger Ebert said, “no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it.”

Snow Rocks.

There is nothing so sublime as stepping outside at night into a fresh blanket of newly fallen snow, on a windless night. It is a silence, a quiet unlike any you will ever experience elsewhere.

“The only other sound’s the sweep
of easy wind and downy flake.”

We’re experiencing it here right now. Winter has arrived. Snow is here. Christmas will be white. The low on Sunday will be -10F (-23C).

Sorry, all you southerly-latitude, low-altitude folks down in Florida and Louisiana and Texas and Arizona and Southern California. You’re just plain missing out. Get on a plane and come north and enjoy it. But quick, before it gets warm here again.

Till next time, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

Bryan Todd

“To be nobody but myself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.”   – e. e. cummings (1894-1962)